Skip to content

Usage statistics

GitLab Inc. will periodically collect information about your instance in order to perform various actions.

All statistics are opt-out, you can enable/disable them from the admin panel under Admin area > Settings > Usage statistics.

Version check

If enabled, version check will inform you if a new version is available and the importance of it through a status. This is shown on the help page (i.e. /help) for all signed in users, and on the admin pages. The statuses are:

  • Green: You are running the latest version of GitLab.
  • Orange: An updated version of GitLab is available.
  • Red: The version of GitLab you are running is vulnerable. You should install the latest version with security fixes as soon as possible.

Orange version check example

GitLab Inc. collects your instance's version and hostname (through the HTTP referer) as part of the version check. No other information is collected.

This information is used, among other things, to identify to which versions patches will need to be back ported, making sure active GitLab instances remain secure.

If you disable version check, this information will not be collected. Enable or disable the version check at Admin area > Settings > Usage statistics.

Usage ping

Introduced in GitLab Enterprise Edition 8.10. More statistics were added in GitLab Enterprise Edition 8.12. Moved to GitLab Community Edition in 9.1.

GitLab sends a weekly payload containing usage data to GitLab Inc. The usage ping uses high-level data to help our product, support, and sales teams. It does not send any project names, usernames, or any other specific data. The information from the usage ping is not anonymous, it is linked to the hostname of the instance.

You can view the exact JSON payload in the administration panel.

Deactivate the usage ping

The usage ping is opt-out. If you want to deactivate this feature, go to the Settings page of your administration panel and uncheck the Usage ping checkbox.

To disable the usage ping and prevent it from being configured in future through the administration panel, Omnibus installs can set the following in gitlab.rb:

gitlab_rails['usage_ping_enabled'] = false

And source installs can set the following in gitlab.yml:

production: &base
  # ...
  gitlab:
    # ...
    usage_ping_enabled: false